We can’t experience what happened in the past except through what we picture in our minds – through what comes to life in our imagination – when we hear or read stories, look at artifacts, or visit historical sites. Stories by Alice Munro enhance a person’s capacity to imagine the lives that people lived in the past.

Also of relevance: An April 6, 2015 New Yorker article is entitled: “The System: Two new histories show how the Nazi concentration camps worked.”

Some book titles refer to a particular year, such as 1959 or 1995, as a point during which everything changed. A March 30, 2015 New Yorker article, that discusses the practice of specifying the significance of particular years, is entitled: “Thinking Sideways: The one-dot theory of history.”

Updates (2): Maysles films that focus upon the 1960s

With regard to the year 1968, referred to earlier in this post, an excellent film that came out in the 1960s is Beatles: The First U.S. Visit by Albert and David Maysles. Another first-rate film by the Maysles brothers that captures the feeling of the 1960s is Salesman. The latter documentary focuses upon the day to day life of a bygone era, of a team of Bible salesman travelling in their 1960s American automobiles, stopping at towns across America to sell their wares. The documentary work of the Maysles brothers adopts a “direct” approach to cinematography which stands in contrast to the style of messaging associated with National Film Board productions.

The first Maysles brothers film that I saw, recently, was Grey Gardens, which has become a cult classic.

In the late 1970s when I was writing articles and film reviews for Cinema Canada, and in the years that followed, I sometimes thought about the fact that all NFB films, regardless of the topic, always embodied the same look and feel.

When I recently began to view and read about the documentary films of the Maysles brothers, I came to understand at once why, indeed, all NFB productions are similar in their effect upon the viewer.

The early history of the Film Board accounts for the enduring look and feel of its films. Every NFB film embodies a carefully crafted message; such an approach accounts for the strengths – and the limitations – of this form of cinema. The question that arises is: “So, what if I don’t want to be subjected to a message? What alternatives are available for me, as a viewer of documentaries?”

Image from Arsenal Lands west of Small Arms Building at Dixie Road and Lakeshore Road East. Jaan Pill photo

A May 7, 2015 New York Times article is entitled: ” ‘Forbidden Films’ Exhumes Nazi Poison From the Movie Vaults.”

The opening paragraphs read:

“The Third Reich was not only a totalitarian state but also a total multimedia regime. Seven decades after its fiery collapse, the embers remain — including some 1,200 feature films produced under Joseph Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda. Are they historical evidence, incitements to murder, fascist pornography, evergreen entertainments, toxic waste or passé kitsch? All of the above?

“Those questions are raised by ‘Forbidden Films: The Hidden Legacy of Nazi Film,’ a documentary essay by the German filmmaker Felix Moeller, opening May 13 at Film Forum for a weeklong, free-admission run.

“Mr. Moeller, born 20 years after Germany’s defeat, is concerned about what he sees as youthful disinterest in the Nazi period and the concurrent rise of right-wing nationalism in Europe. He arrived at “Forbidden Films,” he said by telephone from Berlin, after making ‘Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss,’ a documentary about the family legacy of Nazi Germany’s most celebrated director, Veit Harlan. Harlan’s most notorious film, “Jew Süss” (1940) — a period melodrama in which a Jewish moneylender connives to take control of the duchy of Württemberg — is as incontrovertibly anti-Semitic as it was enormously popular.”

[End of excerpt]

A May 31, 2015 New York Times article is entitled: “Spike Lee Comes to Film ‘Chiraq,’ Unsettling Some Chicagoans.”

A July 2, 2015 New York Times article is entitled: “The Man Who Saw America.”

A July 9, 2015 New York Times Review of Books article is entitled: “How You Consist of Trillions of Tiny Machines.”

A Feb. 7, 2016 Guardian article is entitled: “‘My family resisted the Nazis’: why director had to film Alone in Berlin.”

An Aug. 15, 2016 Guardian article is entitled: “Joseph Goebbels’ 105-year-old secretary: ‘No one believes me now, but I knew nothing’: Brunhilde Pomsel worked at the heart of the Nazis’ propaganda machine. As a film about her life is released, she discusses her lack of remorse and the private side of her monstrous boss.”